Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer

by James L. Swanson

  They scanned the terrain for enemy soldiers or local, friendly Virginians. The creek looked deserted, and no one had seen them. But something was wrong. In a few seconds Booth and Herold realized their mistake. They had done it again. This was not Machodoc Creek. They were again in the wrong place.

  Rowing south along the shore, David Herold had mistaken the mouth of Gambo Creek for Machodoc Creek and landed their boat prematurely. But the error did not approach the catastrophic proportions of their misguided landing at Nanjemoy Creek and Indiantown. From earlier trips to the region, Herold recognized exactly where they were. The Machodoc was just one mile southwest of the Gambo. It wouldn’t even be necessary to launch the skiff again. The Machodoc and Mrs. Quesenberry’s place were accessible by an overland route. Herold could walk there in less than half an hour. Booth’s leg made the brief journey impossible for him, so he waited near the boat while Herold sought out Mrs. Quesenberry. She certainly came well recommended, and Booth expected Davey to return soon with good news, food, and horses.

  Herold arrived at the Quesenberry place around 1:00 P.M., Sunday, April 23. Elizabeth Quesenberry, a thirty-nine-year-old widow with three young daughters, was a remarkable woman. A figure of proper breeding and distinguished lineage, she served the Confederate signal agents and couriers who operated in the northern neck of Virginia. Like Sarah Slater, Belle Boyd, Rose Greenhow, and innumerable other Southern women—including possibly the intriguing, alluring Branson sisters of Baltimore, Lewis Powell’s special friends—Elizabeth Quesenberry served the cause behind the scenes by aiding the work of the Confederate underground. The names of most of these women have been lost to history and Elizabeth’s would have faded from memory long ago had Lincoln’s assassin not come calling.

  Bizarrely, false reports spread that morning that Booth was dressing as a woman. General James Barnes, commanding at Point Lookout, Maryland, forwarded an odd report to Stanton, explaining that he had just received the following dispatch from a Captain Willauer at Leonard-town: “Sergeant Bagley, of the mounted detachment stationed at Millstone Landing, informs me that J. Wilkes Booth was seen passing through Great Mills on foot about 9 o’clock this morning. He was dressed in woman’s attire. The sergeant and his men are in pursuit. I will send all the cavalry I have out immediately. Everything shall be done that can be done to secure him. The citizens recognized him as he was passing through.” Barnes informed Stanton, “Great Mills is situated at the head of Saint Mary’s River, about ten miles from Saint Inigoes and twenty from here.”

  General Hancock spread the rumor by sending it to Major General Torbert at Winchester, Major General Emory at Cumberland, and General Stevens at Harper’s Ferry. Hancock ordered them to tell all their subordinate commanders along the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and in West Virginia to the Kanawha that they must not relax their vigilance: “Booth has not yet been arrested, and it is thought that he may attempt to escape in disguise of a woman or otherwise through that portion of the country.”

  Mrs. Quesenberry was not at home when Herold arrived. Instead, he found her fifteen-year-old daughter. The assassin’s emissary asked if her mother was there. No, replied the girl, she was away, but could be sent for. Please do, Herold requested. Booth’s young accomplice, in spite of his disheveled, unwashed, and unshaven state that made him unsuitable for polite conversation with proper young ladies, attempted to engage the teenager in social banter: “I suppose that you ladies pleasure a good deal on the river?”

  “We have no boat,” the girl replied curtly.

  In that case, Herold was pleased to inform her, he had a boat nearby at Gambo Creek and, if she liked, she could have it. The girl considered the meaning of the stranger’s odd offer.

  As soon as Elizabeth Quesenberry returned, David Herold got down to business. Quesenberry maintained her guard: wartime experience taught her to be suspicious of strangers, especially ones who looked like Herold and who offered gifts of boats to teenage girls. Herold announced that Thomas Jones had sent him to her. That recommendation, plus a few choice details, persuaded her that this stranger really knew Jones and was not an undercover Union detective trying to entrap her. If Herold came from Jones, and Jones disclosed her name to him, she felt obligated to offer assistance. But what kind?

  Herold revealed there were two of them. The other man, unable to walk, waited at Gambo Creek. Davey asked for food and transportation—either saddled horses or a wagon and team—to ride south. Suspecting or already knowing who Herold’s companion was, Quesenberry calculated that this was too big a job to handle alone. By now the news that Lincoln’s assassin was on the run had spread throughout the countryside of Virginia’s northern neck. Only a fool wouldn’t suspect that John Wilkes Booth was heading for the state. If he had not already crossed the Potomac, he would try soon, and his likely landing spot was somewhere nearby. And here, in Mrs. Quesenberry’s front yard, stood a suspicious young stranger, offering to give away his boat, and asking for horses. As an experienced Confederate agent, she knew what to do: summon help at once. She sent for Thomas Harbin, a leading Confederate agent in the area with the kind of experience to handle this delicate situation. Moreover, Harbin possessed two other equally important credentials. He was Thomas Jones’s brother-in-law. And he knew Booth. In December 1864, Dr. Mudd introduced Harbin to Booth at the Bryantown Tavern when the actor was organizing his plot to kidnap Abraham Lincoln.

  Thomas Harbin responded promptly to Elizabeth’s summons, bringing along another operative, Joseph Baden. Herold explained the situation and asked for help. Quickly, Harbin decided upon the best strategy: go to Booth around sundown, feed him, and get him moving south as swiftly as possible. It was a race now. There was no more time to hide out in fixed positions, evading the manhunters by camouflage and cunning. Booth must make a run from northern Virginia, through the state’s interior, and then into the Deep South. Speed of movement was now the key, just like on the night of April 14 when Booth raced out of Washington.

  MRS. QUESENBERRY PREPARED FOOD FOR THE FUGITIVES and turned it over to David Herold. She would not ride to Gambo Creek, and she never laid eyes on Booth. An operative never took unnecessary risks. But she did not need to meet Booth to help him. Herold could carry the food, and Harbin would arrange for the horses. Her work was done. Journeying to Gambo Creek personally might have indulged her personal curiosity, but it was not essential to the mission. Harbin mobilized a third operative, William Bryant, with instructions to saddle two horses and bring them to Gambo Creek. Booth, lame and stranded, could not come to them. Bryant needed to retrieve the assassin, get him in the saddle, and escort him to the next stop down the line. About an hour before sunset, Harbin and Herold called on Bryant’s place, north of Machodoc Creek and about three miles below Matthias Point. From here they rode to Booth’s hiding place near the Gambo. As they approached, Herold signaled the assassin not to shoot, just as Thomas Jones had signaled them in the pine thicket. Bryant and Herold lifted Booth into the saddle and the party rode to their next destination, the home of Dr. Richard Stuart, about eight miles from William Bryant’s place.

  They arrived at Stuart’s after dark around 8:00 P.M., just as the doctor and his family were finishing supper. When the doctor went to the door, he found two men he knew, William Bryant and a man named Crisman, in the company of two strangers. David Herold was on foot and the rest were on horseback, Booth and Bryant riding a sorrel and a gray. Keeping close to his front door, Stuart spoke to the haggard pair:

  “Who are you?”

  “We are Marylanders in want of accommodations for the night,” Herold replied.

  Stuart wasn’t interested: “It is impossible; I have no accommodations for anybody.”

  Davey pleaded their case: his brother had broken his leg, and someone recommended they see Stuart for medical treatment and help on their journey.

  Unmoved, Stuart’s answer was the same—no.

  Well, wasn’t he a doctor? Herold demanded.

  Stuart possess
ed a quick riposte for any question. “I am no surgeon. I am only a physician,” he begged off, implying that he knew nothing about broken bones, setting fractures, or making splints.

  But the recommendation came from Dr. Mudd, Herold boasted.

  Unimpressed, Stuart claimed he had never heard of him: “I don’t know Dr. Mudd—never saw him. I don’t know that I had ever heard of Dr. Mudd.” And anyway, “Nobody was authorized to recommend anybody to me.”

  Booth did not speak, relying on Herold to press the matter: “If you listen to the circumstances of the case, you will be able to do it.”

  Alarmed by the stranger’s persistence, Stuart rebuffed him: “I don’t want to know anything about you.”

  Stuart agreed to give them some food, but that was all. He did not like their appearance or manner and was suspicious of their story: “I did not really believe he had a broken leg; I thought that it was all put on.” Their tale did not make sense. Herold claimed that they were Confederate soldiers eager to continue the war after Lee’s surrender: “We are Marylanders going to Mosby.” But Stuart knew that Mosby’s war was over: “Mosby has surrendered, I understand, you will have to get your paroles.” Obviously the strangers were lying.

  Reluctantly, Stuart told them to come in the house for their meal. The sooner they ate, the quicker he could get rid of them. Herold walked in, and Booth followed on his crutches. Stuart’s three adult daughters and his son-in-law were seated at the table. The fugitives joined them and began their meal. Booth and Herold were an odd spectacle at Stuart’s fine table. How out of place these haggard travelers seemed. Or did they? Yes, Herold was obviously a callow, verbose youth of the common class. But Booth’s filthy clothes, unshaven face, and malodorous body could not camouflage who he really was. His cultivated manners, educated voice, and physical poise marked him as a gentleman. The dichotomy between Booth’s appearance and his status must have puzzled his well-born tablemates.

  It also puzzled Dr. Stuart. While the strangers dined, the doctor remained outside, chatting with William Bryant: “It is very strange,” mused Stuart. “I know nothing about these men; I cannot accommodate them; you will have to take them somewhere else.” Bryant professed that he did not know their names, either, that they emerged from the marshes near his house and asked to be taken to Dr. Stuart’s. The doctor entered the house to check on his unwanted guests. When he stepped back outside, Bryant and the horses were gone! He exploited Stuart’s brief disappearance into the house to skedaddle and abandon the problem to the doctor. Bryant had done what the strangers asked; his job here was done.

  Stuart panicked. His eyes darted up the road and spotted Bryant two or three hundred yards away. Stuart started running and overtook Bryant: “You must take these men away,” he pleaded. “I can’t accommodate them.” Stuart dashed back into the house to roust his guests. They had been inside a quarter of an hour. They had enjoyed their promised meal. They must leave—now: “The old man is waiting for you; he is anxious to be off; it is cold; he is not well, and wants to go home.” Obeying, Booth and Herold rose from the table immediately and left the house without protest.

  Once outside, they again asked Stuart for help: “It was after they got outside that they were so importunate that I should try to accommodate them.” If Stuart wouldn’t treat Booth’s injury or let them spend the night, wouldn’t he at least get them to Fredericksburg? Stuart rebuffed them again, offering only the possibility of help: “I told them that I had a neighbor near there, a colored man who sometimes hired his wagon, and probably he would do it if he was not very busy, and it would be no harm to try.”

  By now Stuart knew exactly who his visitors were. Obviously, they were not Confederate soldiers. That feeble ruse collapsed under superficial examination. The lame man was a well-spoken gentleman, his garrulous boy companion of humbler origins. Judging by their appearance, they had been living outdoors, without shelter, for a week or two. They had traveled south from Maryland into Virginia. They were desperate. And one had a broken leg. They fit the profiles of two men known to the whole country by now. Who could these men be but John Wilkes Booth and David Herold? Stuart dared not speak their names, but his eagerness to eject them from his land shows that he knew how dangerous they could be to him and his family: “I was suspicious of them. I did not know but they might be some of the characters who had been connected with the vile acts of assassination … which I had heard of a few days before.”

  Again Booth suffered “the cold hand they extend to me.” Bryant and his charges departed Cleydael and rode on to the home of Stuart’s “colored man,” William Lucas.

  BRYANT, BOOTH, AND HEROLD APPROACHED THE HUMBLE Lucas cabin—a world removed from Dr. Stuart’s opulent Cleydael estate—around midnight. It was quiet and dark inside. William, his wife, and his son were asleep. Davey leaned in close to the crude, barred plank door. “Lucas!” he called sharply. Herold’s summons woke the dogs sleeping nearby, raising a chorus of barks. The hounds woke William Lucas, who, when he heard one of Bryant’s horses neighing in the yard, suspected that thieves were after his team. Then again he heard a strange voice: “Lucas.” He did not recognize the speaker and refused to unlock the door. “People had been shot that way,” he reasoned.

  Lucas demanded that the voice identify itself. Instead, the speaker, unwilling to disclose his identity, and communicating as through a secret code, uttered the names of three men and asked if Lucas knew them, implying through attitude of voice that he should. He didn’t and became frightened. The strange voice must belong to a robber or a horse thief. There was no way that he would open his door to the mysterious, threatening stranger standing on the other side, inches away. The stranger called out a fourth name, William Bryant. Lucas knew this one, but what difference did that make? The stranger could have picked up the name anywhere. Then a second voice called out: Lucas. It is me, William Bryant. You know me. Relieved, Lucas unlocked the door, swung it open, and stepped outside. Bryant and two strangers stepped forward.

  “We want to stay here tonight,” the youngest member of the trio declared bluntly, omitting the courtesy of an introduction.

  Bewildered by the unexpected request, and put off by Herold’s rudeness, Lucas resisted: “You cannot do it. I am a colored man and have no right to take care of white people; I have only one room in the house and my wife is sick.”

  Herold became belligerent: “We are Confederate soldiers, we have been in service three years; we have been knocking about all night, and don’t intend to any longer … we are going to stay.”

  Before Lucas could object again, Booth hobbled around him on his crutches, forced his way into the cabin, and claimed a chair.

  Pursuing the lame man into his home, Lucas chastised them for their rudeness: “Gentlemen, you have treated me very badly.”

  Booth, seething from Dr. Stuart’s rebuff, was in no mood for etiquette lessons from an impudent, free black man who did not know his place. How dare Dr. Stuart, lapsed gentleman, cast him into the night? Stuart had not heard the last from John Wilkes Booth. And how dare Stuart, adding insult to the injury, banish him to some Negro shack, degrading the great tragedian like a man of the lowest class and order, like some filthy beggar or runaway slave. “This country was formed for the white, not for the black man,” Booth had declared in his secret political manifesto of 1864; “Nigger citizenship,” he spewed venomously in response to Lincoln’s April 11, 1865, speech. And now, here he sat, begging a black man for accommodations, and suffering insults in reply: Never!

  Booth’s simmering blood boiled over in a way it had not since the assassination night. Still seated, the actor froze William Lucas with a hateful stare while dropping his hand to his waist, his fingers feeling for the handle of his knife. He had not unsheathed it in anger since he baptized its razor-sharp blade with Major Rathbone’s blood, now dried and still caked on the knife, partly obscuring its acid-etched, defiantly patriotic mottos. Booth could easily have cleansed the knife in Dr. Mudd’s washbasi
n, or in the freshwater spring at the pine thicket, but chose not to. Instead, he cherished its stained, mirrored surface like a relic of a martyred saint, a vivid, tangible memento of the assassination. He had lost the ultrasouvenir—his Deringer—when he grappled with Rathbone in the president’s box. But he still possessed the knife as a personal reminder that blood had been spilt, and there was no turning back: “I have done the deed,” in the words of Macbeth. The bloody keepsake resonated like a symbolic stigmata of wounds not suffered, but inflicted, by the assassin’s hand.

  Booth’s hand rose from his waistband until the quickly moving blade caught William Lucas’s eye. “Old man, how do you like that?” Booth growled, waving the knife in the air.

  “I do not like it at all!” pleaded Lucas, who was always terrified of knives.

  Booth was one provocation away from unwinding another powerful, arcing swing of the blade, but he calmed himself. Murdering a black family in their cabin was sure to attract unwanted attention. And Booth considered himself in a class above the common cutthroat. As he argued in his datebook, his motives were purer than those of Brutus or William Tell. Booth still burned at a world turned upside down, but reason dictated that he use, and not kill, William Lucas.

  The actor sheathed the knife and assumed a less threatening guise. The point had been made, and Booth did not need to brandish the pistols and carbine. In the cabin’s dim light, Lucas saw them clearly enough. Booth informed Lucas what they really wanted: “We were sent here, old man; we understand you have good teams.” So it was the horses, Lucas thought, just as he feared when he heard the strange voice outside his door. Lucas pleaded with Booth to leave his horses alone, explaining that he had hired hands coming Monday to plant corn. Convinced that the strangers would try to steal the horses, Lucas spoke evasively and claimed that the animals were far away, in the pasture. It would be hard searching for them in the dark. Booth turned to Herold and closed the matter: “Well, Dave, we will not go on any further, but stay here and make this old man get us this horse in the morning.” William Bryant, his task done, rode away, abandoning Lucas and his family to the strangers he had brought into their cabin.